True tales of the Buckeye state

Like a good 98 percent of my readership (hi, Mom!), I come from the great state of Ohio. And like that same percentage, I left Ohio for a very good reason.

It’s not the abundance of ever-flowing farmland, stretching between mini-malls as far as the eye can see. It’s not the smell, which they say you get used to but in 15 years I never did. It’s the people.

People in Ohio are crazy.

You might be out there snickering, “Well yeah, look how they drive.”

That’s not fair. For being crazy, people from Ohio are excellent drivers inasmuch as they are at least better than Georgia drivers, who are trained to operate motor vehicles via reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

No, Ohioans are a special Midwestern variety of crazy, as I was reminded while scouring news for “The Funday Times,” our weekly roundup of stupid people making headlines. The actual story, as reported by the Associated Press, is as follows:

MASON, Ohio — A southwest Ohio man charged with teasing a police dog by barking at it says a city law violates free speech.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports the attorney for 25-year-old Ryan James Stephens says his client was not striking the animal in suburban Mason. Lawyer Jim Hardin says barking may not be seen as intelligent speech but is “still speech.” He questions the validity of a city law that bars taunting police dogs.

A police officer investigating a car crash at a pub on April 3 reported he heard the dog barking uncontrollably. The officer said he found Stephens making barking noises and hissing at a dog inside the police car.

The officer’s report quoted Stephens as saying “the dog started it” and said the man appeared highly intoxicated.

Not only was a man arrested for barking at a police dog (who clearly started it), but enough people had barked at police dogs before him that they felt compelled to make a law against it. They have to make laws like this in Ohio, you see.

Then there was another story a few weeks back about an Ohio man who sat in his barcalounger so long he became fused with it on a molecular level and scientists had to come separate him from his chair using some very sophisticated methods (They pulled. Hard). This is a true story. I don’t feel like looking it up right now, though, so you’ll have to trust me.

In my 15 years in Ohio, I saw my share of crazy Ohio-based activities, but never more so than the infamous “Night I Almost Exploded.”

At Ohio State, there is a fraternal organization of very serious alcoholics known as the Ski Club. They got together, owned a house, had an official charter and everything. Since Columbus, Ohio, is notably lacking in mountains or large bodies of water, the only thing the Ski Club didn’t do is ski.

What they did do was throw massive parties, one of which was famously raided by those notorious buzzkills down at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The year after the raid, the Ski Club wisely chose to hold the exact same party again, only this time they utilized the brilliant plan of asking everyone who came in “are you with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms?” and if you said “yes” you were asked to leave.

I somehow scraped some common sense together and decided not to go, but my roommate Nick went with full confidence in the legal acumen of the Ohio State Ski Club.

Needless to say, when I got the call at 3 a.m. he’d been arrested, I packed up all my toldja sos and headed on down to police headquarters to bail him out.

I was about halfway there when, distracted by the fact it was 3 a.m. and I was legally asleep, I came within inches of planting my car bumper first into an elderly man who was crossing the street carrying a box of liquor bottles (it’s a more common hazard in Ohio than you might think).

Just my luck, the exact same guy is standing in line in front of me when I walk into police headquarters, still carrying his liquor box and fortunately not able to ID the guy who almost plowed through him with his car.

The punchline to this whole story comes when the guy reaches the front of the line, plops the case down on the counter and announces the most Ohio sentence of all time, “I found this liquor bottle box full of live hand grenades in my neighbor’s garage and I figured I should give them to you guys.”

Now they may have laws against barking at police dogs in Ohio, but I was fortunate to find out on “The Night I Almost Exploded” that while there are laws against barking at police dogs in Ohio, there are no laws on the books against soiling oneself out of sheer horror in the lobby of police headquarters.

Just to be safe, I moved down here where I am marginally safer from being exploded by Ohioans, although as a tradeoff I now face the constant threat of bombardment by Georgia drivers.

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